


No Common Sense

by arsenic_kiss_221



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Autism Spectrum, Drabble, Gen, Senses, sensory processing disorder
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-09
Updated: 2014-11-09
Packaged: 2018-02-24 18:02:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,221
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2591018
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arsenic_kiss_221/pseuds/arsenic_kiss_221
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock sensed things differently than everyone, and his particular combination had the world considering him as something akin to superhuman. He could notice miniscule sights, scents, noises, piece them all together like a jigsaw in his Palace, and never seemed able to be hurt or injured. He was not superhuman, he was just an addict to stimuli.</p>
            </blockquote>





	No Common Sense

            It was hard to describe to most people. When he was younger he used to think that he was not alone in his perception, his processing of the world. As he grew older though, he was made to understand that he was unique, genuinely alone, as far as he could tell anyways. His actions were his own, _special_ as his mother so dotingly had called it. Mycroft was special too, in a different way. Mycroft understood people, understood them a bit too much in fact, so much that he was able to learn how to control, manipulate, extort, at a young age.

            Sherlock was the opposite; Sherlock did not understand people _at all_.

            Or at least he didn’t understand the way they sensed.

            “What’s it like in your funny little head?”

            He wished he could explain but every time he would try the words would falter and fail, stutter and sputter out, and he would be left looking _stupid_ and _ridiculous_ two things he positively resented in others, let alone himself.

            How could he describe a battlefield to someone who had never been a part of the war?

            “What’s it like in your funny head?” John asks again.

            His best way of explaining is simply to show him the results.

            “How’s your leg, it must be acting up again. You stumbled on the stairs on the way in, new nick on your watch, outside edge not inside, left arm specifically, so you stumbled  walking up the stairs holding the grocery bags in your right arm. You got eggs then, wouldn’t have fallen against the wall so hard unless you were scared of breaking something, only thing breakable from the market would be eggs. Why did you get eggs, John, you know I don’t eat eggs. If your leg is acting up again I would suggest not having another exerting night at Sarah’s.”

            John responds by sighing, resisting the temptation to roll his eyes, and opening up the newspaper he picked up from the shops. “Sherlock, if you don’t like eggs you can go do your own shopping.”

            No one ever understood, his deductions were the result of his senses and his senses were what were the problem.

            His senses were not akin to the masses.

            He thrived on the chaos of the details. On the constant influx of colors and sounds, of small changes in the usual patterns. He was a genius, yes, and that was why he could expound on all the details, make connections from A to Z and back to Q in the blink of an eye, but that wasn’t what made him brilliant. He was brilliant because he was _special_ , because he noticed the details no one else did, because his brain and sensory processes needed them, demanded that he be constantly stimulated, always going, always delving deeper into the chaos of the stimuli around him.

            The nick in the watch. No one could have noticed because they would be focusing on John’s face most likely, watching to see how the lines in his face twitched, how his eyes would crinkle or open. It was how _others_ read people; they could see the emotions in their face.

            That was not Sherlock’s way, it never had been. A face was a mystery, one he could never quite crack, although his foray’s into the science behind facial expressions had given him the basics at least. No, there wasn’t quite enough data in the face, and faces could lie (as his so often did when he was playing a role undercover).

            Sherlock gathered his data about others from tangible evidence that couldn’t be manipulated. This way he could get the full story, skip the nebula of facial expression. And even in his youth, before he had begun building his deductions, he had always noticed minute details rather than the bigger picture. A watch was more reassuring than the eyes, words were easier to focus on than tone of voice. He had always noticed the details before he picked up on the larger scheme; always building the puzzle starting from a single piece instead of working his way down from the top.

            It was just the way his senses worked. Focus was always on those things others tended to look over in their pursuit of the truth. The general thought was to gather the most information from one place. In Sherlock’s experience, it was easier to draw conclusions from five little scraps of knowledge than one overarching, general, and fallible thing.

            His senses even betrayed him with touch, with taste, with smells and food and _stimuli._

Food was hard for him because most of the time, the textures just repulsed him. So he resigned himself to toast and tea, two things he felt very comfortable with.

            Eggs. He hated them, didn’t like them because the texture was too moist and bubbly. The notion made him squeamish. Anything with an off-putting texture did. His mother had forced him to eat them as a child despite this.

            Scents were interesting, intriguing, and he could pick up on small scents only because his body seeked them out. If something novel was added to the chaos around him, his nose could easily pick up on it, and connect it to the catalogue of stimuli he kept in his brain.

            Touch was hard; he didn’t like people touching him because it made him uneasy. His sense of touch was considerably dulled actually, logically probably because his other senses were on hyperdrive. He couldn’t feel anything, pain, touches of affection, objects, unless the stimulus was huge, unless he had a tight grip on the object or the pain was what would be considered nigh unbearable to _normal_ people. His mother had scolded him for hugging too tight, and his father had squirmed under the grip of his handshakes. The maid had been annoyed by him constantly accidently breaking things, and John knew that he had a high pain tolerance. So he had resigned himself to dispelling of all physical contact long ago because it was embarrassing to not have control over _that_ sense.

            Sherlock sensed things differently than everyone, and his particular combination had the world considering him as something akin to superhuman. He could notice miniscule sights, scents, noises, piece them all together like a jigsaw in his Palace, and never seemed able to be hurt or injured. He was not superhuman, he was just _gifted_ or _special._ He was just an addict to stimulus.

            Cocaine just added another depth to the stimuli and allowed him to keep moving with the speed of his thoughts and senses. He was an addict to the results of the high, not the high itself. Until Mycroft had intervened, as he so often did, after that night on the roof (but he had deleted that long ago, shoved it to the basement of his Mind Palace. He wasn’t delving into _that_ tonight).  

            Sherlock knew what made him different, what set him apart. It was his senses, his processing of these senses, the tangle of wires, nerves, and synapses that were just connected differently in his body than in others. Simple science really, and when mixed with the Holmes genius it had created a formidable man.

            “What’s it like in your funny head?”

            He didn’t even want to attempt to explain.


End file.
